About Us
Our parishes offers a warm and friendly welcome to people of all ages and backgrounds. Our worship services, while relaxed, are shaped by the Anglican tradition and its Book of Common Prayer. We are a growing congregation and especially enjoy welcoming new members. We hope you will come and join us.
Our Vision
Our parish vision is shaped by the three great Christian virtues of Faith, Hope and Love. All three of these virtues trace their importance in Christian belief and practice to St Paul writing in 1 Corinthians 13, who points out that “the greatest of these is love.”
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Faith – We are a community of faith, where every person is welcome; we act in faith, and it is through faith, we trust in God and seek to live our lives by and share with others.
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Hope – We have everlasting hope in our lives and beyond from Jesus; as a parish community, we seek to bring hope to others by sharing the light of Christ.
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Love – We are a parish family centred upon love. We carry around the love of God with us and in us. We are called to share the love of God with every person we meet in word and in action.
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We exist to worship God and be a place for our local community.
Our aims are:
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To grow and widen our worshipping community.
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To deepen the discipleship of our members.
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To serve our local community.
Our Parish Community
Our parishes are located in beautiful Mid-Ulster, with many of our parishioners living in Desertmartin, Knockloughrim, Curran and Magherafelt, as well as the surrounding area.
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We are a community made up of people with a range of backgrounds, with different gifts and experiences, and we welcome that and rejoice in the diversity of people God calls to follow him. We seek to be a community that puts into practice St Benedict’s teaching that everyone must be welcomed as Christ himself. We look forward to welcoming you.
Our Belief
As members of the Church of Ireland and worldwide Anglican Communion, we hold fast to the teachings of the early "Ecumenical Councils" - that is, to those gatherings of Bishops from around the world which took place in the days before the Church first became divided into different denominations. We teach the faith received and codified in the 'Catholic Creeds' - that is, the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed.
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We believe that God's single greatest revelation of himself to mankind was the Incarnation - the birth, life, ministry, passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; as such we seek to lead incarnational lives, taking Jesus, the Good Shepherd, as our constant model and inspiration. We also believe in God's continuous revelation of himself to mankind through the guiding work of the Holy Spirit, who has always been present in the life of the created world, but since the Day of Pentecost has dwelt in the very midst of the Church, and in the heart of every believer who has received him there; we believe that in Confirmation each individual receives gifts of the Holy Spirit particular to his or her ministry and vocational calling.
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We believe in the Holy Scriptures of the Old Testament and the New Testament as the revealed Word of God, containing all things necessary for salvation. We hold to the Anglican tradition of basing our faith upon "Scripture, Tradition, & Reason'. In other words, our faith is governed by the teachings of Scripture, by the developed tradition of the Church (which has developed under the guidance of the Holy Spirit), and in the God-given gift of human reason by which we interpret these ancient truths and proclaim them afresh in each generation. As Anglicans we believe in the government of the Church by Bishops, and in the ordained ministry of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, supported by a huge range of lay ministries, including diocesan readers, parish readers, evangelists, missionaries, and indeed the individual vocational ministries of each member of each congregation.
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We celebrate the two Sacraments of Holy Baptism (God's cleansing forgiveness, freely given, through blessed water), and the Holy Eucharist (Jesus' own body and blood, freely given for our spiritual nourishment, through blessed bread and wine); and we hold these great sacraments, commanded in scripture, to be necessary for salvation. We also recognise God's use of other sacramental gifts to feed and sustain his church - in particular in the sacramental celebration of Unction (anointing the sick with oil), Confirmation as a channel of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, Holy Matrimony (Christian marriage), Holy Orders (Christian ordination), and Reconciliation (the gift of confession with forgiveness of sins).
At the Parishes of Desertmartin and Termoneeny we hold to an open policy of welcome and worship. This means that everybody is welcome at any of our church services. We believe we are all made in God's image and are all equally loved by God. We seek to be a church that affirms every person and is welcoming of both human experience and diversity. Our worship is open to all people; we care about people's present and their future, so we do not waste time judging anybody's past.